I first started Alan Wake years ago, but only got into the tutorial before my attention wandered. After playing Control on release and with the hype for Alan Wake 2 building, I figured it was time to sit down and play through the remaster. While this is still probably the right call for maximum enjoyment of the sequel, I found the original game to be dull, frustrating, overly long, needlessly repetitive, and honestly outright bad.

The story is Alan Wake’s only real appeal. What clearly begins by resting on the laurels of Twin Peaks does blossom (with the help of the excellent Control) into a wider narrative that is genuinely engaging. For the most part, anyway. I won’t go into too many specifics because I do think that’s what makes the game tick. It’s relatively well delivered, but paced terribly and is overly vague. There are a couple details that get expanded on in the DLC and the spinoff Alan Wake’s American Nightmare that do originate from this game, but… they’re not really actually explained. Even the wiki is a little unclear about how certain details line up. It stinks that you have to get info from so many other places to see the full broader narrative, but I guess that was the intent from the start, so it’s hardly worth criticizing. The full cast is shockingly small, with really only Alan and Barry and the Anderson brothers being consistent characters. Agent Nightingale is basically absent from the story and the other Bright Falls residents are genuinely window dressing. Still, despite these issues, there is an appeal here. YMMV if the game itself is worth trudging through for that.

The real death knell for Alan Wake is the gameplay. For a narrative focused game, almost nothing you do is related to the actual narrative. The cutscenes and manuscripts tell the story, and the bulk of the chapters (“Episodes”) of the game itself are mostly traipsing through forest segments fighting shadow people. The third person shooting mechanics here are laughably shallow. Alan’s flashlight burns the darkness off of infected people - “Taken” - (who I guess are beyond saving despite that, because he then kills the shit out of them) and your weapons kill them.
You have a pistol, a shotgun, a hunting rifle, and a variation of each (ex: pump shotgun). Flares act as “get off me” tools and flashbangs are grenades. That’s about it. Alan moves like a tank through a swimming pool of high-grade molasses, and his stamina is awful, giving you very little mobility in fights. A not-super-reliable dodge can save you sometimes, but once you’re surrounded you’re likely to take damage regardless, as the terrible camera and bad environmental design allows enemies to easily swarm you. There are really only about 5 enemies, and they’re all variations on either lumberjacks or fishermen. I figured from the first chapter that this was an aesthetic choice for that part of the story, and I would go on to fight, say, Taken engineers, or Taken chefs or something. No, it’s just lumberjacks all the way down. The game loves to just send Alan into the woods to fight things, and it is actually a majority of this game’s runtime. I cannot stress just how dull and repetitive these sections are - I groaned audibly when I figured a chapter was ending only to find out I had multiple more forest segments to go. The game also only knows to switch things up by taking away your weapons, not by throwing new enemies or challenges at you. Alan will regularly get into a car / helicopter / window accident that causes him to run into the woods, having forgotten or lost his guns and ammo, forcing you to scavenge new ones that are exactly the same. The game will throw a wave or two of enemies at you over and over until you reach a checkpoint, get given ammo for every gun you have, heal, and then do it again.

To be a little more analytical, Alan’s iconic flashlight doesn't work effectively as a mechanic since it is REQUIRED to make enemies vulnerable - there's nothing clever you can do to manage a crowd like in Resident Evil 4, you literally just have to focus one Taken at a time and kill them all. The addition of the flares and flashbangs helps, but these are just an escape from the central mechanics being extremely weak. The level design is atrocious, and it feels like the increase in enemy numbers is always hiding the fact that the mechanical depth is simply not enough to create any meaningful sense of progression throughout, resulting in a need to bury the player under the weight of sheer numbers and the time it takes to flashlight each enemy down before killing them.

In terms of pacing, there's rarely any payoff to a bunch of different objectives - when Alan runs from the cops (sigh... into the forest) and he sees the radio station, you'd think that once you get there you'll get character building, context, even just a break from woods-walking. Nope, the second you see the DJ inside, a cutscene plays and the cops shoot at Alan through the window so he jumps out and runs into the forest. Not a single second of this exchange is worth anything, it is blatant and embarrassing filler. The player is teased with an objective, a possible meeting with another character, a break from the mediocre gameplay - only to have it last less than 20 seconds before returning you to a carbon copy of what you did for the last 15 minutes. The other objectives outside the woods feel like busywork: get this gate open, go get a generator running, etc. Episode 5’s walk through the abandoned Bright Falls is a real highlight of the game as it is not just a break from forest segments, but also feels connected to the narrative and worth engaging with.

some bullet points:
- sheriff breaker is an agent of the bureau of control, which is kind of awesome
- there's this one clip of the dark presence taking Alan's wife that plays probably 10 times in the story when he like has a flash of pain in his head and it's only like 0.8 seconds long and it repeated so many times i thought my game was bugged
- Nightingale calling Wake different authors' names is pretty funny
- the possessed barrels and girders flying at you suck so much
- i hope you like Adidas bc this game could be an ad for it with how much that one enemy in the tracksuit shows up
- Barry gets a head torch and Alan wants it. yeah me too man, me too
- that final "boss" is such a whimper to end a game on
- the whole final act is weirdly quick and anticlimactic for a game that's already double the length it should be
- the episodes of Night Springs that play on tvs are the most well written part of the game, they really capture the tone that makes Control feel so special

I feel like I haven’t even really touched on how many things about this game bothered me, but I’m going to end there. A truly frustrating and dull experience that offers gameplay so wretched that I did consider stopping and watching a Lets Play for the last half. While looking some stuff up about it, I saw someone say that they believed this was the best linear third person shooter ever made. I truly hope for their sake that they played RE4 or Dead Space after they made that comment, because it is a grim statement otherwise.